I have a client who's an inventor. He has a picture frame hanging product in Home Depots across the U.S., and we're currently redesigning the packaging (and developing a mascot - my favorite part!). He's been developing the files in Microsoft Publisher, where he has his instruction graphics and such. I don't have Publisher but have emailed him some design features I overlaid onto JPEGs in Illustrator, which he then tries to recreate in Publisher. I think his final output is PDF. As expected, we have font clashing issues, and it's a slightly clunky process.

Is Publisher a good design program? Should I just ask that he hand over all the important graphics (instructions, logo, etc) and let me make the packaging design in Illustrator? I could turn all text into outlines for the final PDF output and he would likely be able to work with it in the future if needed, right?